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Shawn Fanning Is Back Into Digital Music
prostoalex writes "News.com has a lengthy 3-page article on Shawn Fanning's new venture, Snocap. After years of development the company is coming out of the stealth mode and has apparently already secured a distribution deal with Universal Music, promising to turn file-sharers into loyal paying customers overnight. Both News.com and Associated Press are skimpy on the details, but apparently Snocap will market the technology that will (a) sniff out the files shared illegally and (b) fill the peer-to-peer networks with licensed content and serve as a clearing house for the ventures who want to license digital music, but don't want to deal with gazillion of music labels." (We mentioned Snocap last in January.)
promising to turn file-sharers into loyal paying customers overnight.
Hasn't this already happened??
-Teiresias
What if they force the Internet provider to wipe any file that is not signed by them and thus prevent these p2p networks to be used for Free contents ?
As a provider of such files, I think I'd have a problem because I want my Free files to circulate freely so they'd better have a good sniffer.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
What else are they offering besides Shawn's name? That won't be enough when stacked up against ITunes and other competitors. There has to be a real consumer value. The percentage of their desired customer base that has heard of Shawn is less than 1%. An even smaller percentage care if Shawn is involved or not.
Snocap will market the technology that will (a) sniff out the files shared illegally and (b) fill the peer-to-peer networks with licensed content and
.COMers to have investors escape reality.
California crack must be pretty good these days as it still allows
The reality is CDs need to be priced at $2.50, $4.00 if it is good and new.
Consumers are rebeling at paying $15 for a BTO or Abba that costs the media producers nothing to produce. Plus, many already owned the wax versions.
The media induatry is slowly screwing itself.
Now lets support fiber optics to a country that will put real content on the web, let the adverisers pay for it and open up WebTV for real so I can loose my cable company forever. This country has to have no time for the lawyers and stupid monopolistic legislation.
Therefore every time you submit your MP3 TRM's to MusicBrainz, who in turn pass them onto relatable, his company can use that data to identify the songs on the P2P networks.
Far more accurate (although slower) than looking at the title of the files. Additionally, changing the metadata within the MP3 won't make a difference.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I think people are vastly missing the point here. (Surprise.)
The idea with Napster was that Fanning *always* said that he wanted to work with the music labels. The labels (and the RIAA) unfortunately hated his idea so they sued him out of existence. In my opinion, that was a mistake. The oldskool Napster would have been a fantastic method of tracking and eventually reimbursing labels, publishers and musicians. It was the first effective music distribution network. So no: he's never been "pimping himself out to both sides of the fence." The idea was that he always wanted Napster to become the leading legitimate online distribution method.
Snocap monitors the contents of files being traded on current P2P networks (they don't say who but we could guess) and then reports that information back to a central server to monitor how often a file (of any type) has been traded and downloaded. That data can then be turned into invoices and sent to ISP's and their customers.
With that information, he could then approach organizations like ASCAP or BMI, who already get similar information from BDI and other broadcast monitoring services, and use that information for charting purposes and for reimbursement to publishers. BDI charges for this service, and so could Snocap. Since file downloads are a mixture of a broadcast and an "owned goods" model, it's not being welcomed by the likes of ASCAP either but there are likely tons of other options in terms of billing / invoicing services for this kind of monitoring. Remember: This was *always* the plan for the original Napster.
You can be "sick of" hearing Shawn Fanning's name all the time but the bottom line is he did have a legitimate plan for Napster to begin with which was summarily shut down by the record labels (who it likely would have benefited immensely had they followed it through its course.)
I think Snocap is a potentially good idea for many reasons. Mostly because I do enjoy the current methodology of the numerous P2P products out there, and also because having worked in the industry, it takes a long time to get your hands on the kind of data which something like Snocap could provide. Snocap could inevitably replace Soundscan if it was proven to be both secure and reliable enough.
If Fanning didn't do this it's questionable just how long it would take for an existing music industry company to do so.
$0.02
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Because I can! [Brainrub.com]
From the whole "napster" thing, to the nonsense in The Italian Job...
First of all, why put napster in quotes like it is some sort of imaginary thing? And second, you're upset because a movie made a crack at a piece of pop culture?
Napster was a huge deal at the time. And since the case ended, with the exception of the Italian Job reference, what else is so incredibly over-exposed about Napster that warrants bitching about being tired of it? And I also wouldn't describe him as "pimping himself out to both sides of the fence". He had a great idea and he went with it. So he had the choice of either sticking to his guns and having nothing or agreeing to play by the rules. I doubt that you'd do otherwise.
Perceived value is extremely important and explains who soda drinks can vary so much in price. Why can an event hall sell the exact same can at a ten fold the supermarket sells it? Certainly there costs can't be that much higher?
Why exactly can toll roads charge so much when most of the people on the road make less salary in the time it takes to drive around? Because they perceive the product they are buying as being worth the higher price.
ipods are worth it, cd's are not.
To counter some of your points.
MORE content. P2p has illegal bootlegs, p2p had the live aid concert for ages with the dvd only being out now.
MORE secure. No credit card to be stolen.
MORE useful. I still can't find that bootleg on iTunes. Or that alternative band.
MORE convenient. Yeah paying 99 cent +++++++++ my internet connection is so convenient. I don't know what salery you make but I can spend a few minutes searching for 99 cents.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Since they are tracking d/ls they should be able to see who is being d/led and arrange payment to the artists/labels for their songs being d/led.
The money to pay them would come from legit banner ads within the program interface. Think about how large of an audience advertisers would be able to reach. I'm not talking about the usual hit the monkey and win but legit ads for things like upcoming movies tennis shoes etc.
As long as the banner ads werent all that obtrusive and the prog didnt install any of the crap like the spyware that comes with KaZaa I would have no problem putting up with ads in exchange for free legit music.
I see, so now I can go out and buy a casette that barely plays anymore from the used record store, and then rightfully download that album so that I can actually listen to it?
</sardonism>
who doesn't want my bandwith used to support someone else's business? (I'm guessing no.)
In free P2P, while someone is downloading my music files, I or someone else can theoretically get something back from them. In this system, a user pays money to a third party, that points that person to my computer and uses my bandwith to deliver the file, and I cannot get any compensation. In contrast, iTunes supplies their own bandwith.
If I am misunderstanding something, please enlighten me, because this sounds ridiculous.
The labels (and the RIAA) unfortunately hated his idea so they sued him out of existence. In my opinion, that was a mistake.
Yeah, I have to chime in here. It was a HUGE mistake. In fact, there are a few people like me who are so pissed, we'll never buy from RIAA members ever again because of what they did to Napster. That may sound stupid or an excuse to illegally copy music. The fact is, I own cases and cases of legally purchased CDs and roughly 99% of my MP3 downloads were songs I already had in my collection but downloading was faster and easier than ripping myself.
On top of which, a good number of the downloads that weren't in my collection led to purchases of CDs.
If the music industry had found a way to work with its customers, who clearly wanted this medium, I would have been happy to pay for online music. But instead, they sued their customers and they sued Napster.
So, my feeling now is FUCK THEM. They won't get another penny out of me. They want to make things right with me, they can send me a check for all the crappy quality cassette tapes that stuck to tape heads and got eaten up, or for all the CDs (you know, the media that's supposed to last forever), that got eaten by (Slashdot won't take my link to: http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_328113.html)
Geotrichum fungus while I lived in Mexico.
Yeah, that'll fucking happen. Fuck 'em. I suspect the RIAA will have a much shorter lifespan than I will. I think they've outlived their usefulness and that's going to become readily apparent over the next decade. The music industry business model will change, the power and the money will go to the individual artists, where it belongs, and the RIAA will be but a bad memory.
And even if it doesn't happen, I'll keep hoping for it and I certainly won't help those assholes out.
Why would I bother with this when I already have an alternative that is free of charge, more secure, and has more content?
Exactly.
What the global music corporations (all five of them) don't seem to grasp is that P2P is so successful because millions of people are sharing. That means that they are deciding what they want to place in the P2P library.
Music sellers have never before had a way to specifically identify which person likes which performer. Now a technique arises where people list on their PC that is open to the world exactly which recordings they like best and are willing to share with others. And they are getting all this focused market research for free!
So what do they do? They try to take this gift from the gods and destroy it and put all their most loyal and interested customers in prison for giving them this information about their marketing preferences.
So what if people are listening to recordings for free? It doesn't matter to them. They aren't even paying for all the recordings; the artist's do. The costs of producing the recording and media is taken from the sales receipts and added to the artist's signing advance payment loan.
Imagine if you went to college on the same financial terms. You get a loan for tution to a college wholely owned by the group of five corporations that would 95% of the colleges in the world. Then when you graduate, you not only have to pay back every penny of the loan, but you only get to keep $2 of every $15 of salary that you make for your entire working life. And the college corporation decides what you will major in and where your job is going to be.
That's two different threads with no segue, I know. The inability of the global media corporations to use the marketing data given to them by P2P and the stretch of an analogy between artist-music company relations and college-student financial relations. But, hey, this is slashdot!
No.. No they're not.
Average joe blow consumers are not going to demand higher bitrates or lossless compression.
They might have it marketed to them, as a way to differentiate download services, but none will hear a difference, nor understand why the files are bigger or take longer to d/l.